Philosophical Musings from the Road

Cycling can be a meditative activity. Once you have mastered riding without stabilisers, that slamming on just your front brake could lead to premature ejection from the saddle and that they drive on the right in Central America (that one took a while at “intersections”), your brain is almost entirely freed up to contemplate life’s big questions. As we typically ride for between five and six hours a day, this creates a huge cerebral void to fill. As I am sure you can imagine, we endeavour to put the world to rights, to evolve the musings of Plato and to discuss Lizzie’s evolving tanlines ahead of a (very important) wedding we are attending soon after our return.

In general, the ever ready presence of Google means that most fact-based questions are stopped in their tracks before we are able to explore/argue our own foolproof logic, or highly creative lines of thinking, to suppose our own answer. However, in the absence of a free hand on the bike to tap away and find the ‘real’ answer [note to reader: not everything you read on the internet is true] we’ve gotten quite a lot of mileage out of some good puzzlers.

The fact that each question is so related to our immediate experience might suggest that there is a lot of blood going to our legs and not a lot to our brains, but we have been genuinely engrossed for hours on these:

Can you get sunburnt through tattoos?

If you freeze soda water and add it to a flat drink, would the ice cubes make it fizzy?

What is the quickest you can eat something and it start to be absorbed into your blood?

If an ant is transported in our pannier bags (a frequent occurence in the peanut butter jar), does it:

1. join another colony at its destination
2. for a new colony at its destination (let’s presume there was a boy ant and a girl ant in said pannier)
3. die

Is there a common buffalo between the tomato and the mozzarella? Or is their perfect synergy one of life’s most beautiful coincidences?

When did people first arrive in the UK?

Do birds fly with their beaks open to breathe whilst they fly?

Does each type of cloud formation form at a specific height? If so, what are those heights?

Did we just blow your mind? Insights and answers welcome!